the
horizon, with a rumble here and a roar there, with whistling fiends
riding the blackness above, with a series of popping, impelling reports
seemingly close in front--that drove home to Kurt Dorn a cruel and
present and unescapable reality.

At that instant, like bitter fate, shot up a rocket, or a star-flare of
calcium light, bursting to expose all underneath in pitiless radiance.
With a gasp that was a sob, Dorn shrank flat against the wall, staring
into the fading circle, feeling a creep of paralysis. He must be seen.
He expected the sharp, biting series of a machine-gun or the bursting of
a bomb. But nothing happened, except that the flare died away. It had
come from behind his own lines. Control of his muscles had almost
returned when a heavy boom came from the German side. Miles away,
perhaps, but close! That boom meant a great shell speeding on its
hideous mission. It would pass over him. He listened. The wind came from
that side. It was cold; it smelled of burned powder; it carried sounds
he was beginning to appreciate--shots, rumbles, spats, and thuds,
whistles of varying degree, all isolated sounds. Then he caught a
strange, low moaning. It rose. It was coming fast. It became an
o-o-o-O-O-O! Nearer and nearer! It took on a singing whistle. It was
passing--no--falling!... A mighty blow was delivered to the earth--a
jar--a splitting shock to windy darkness; a wave of heavy air was flung
afar--and then came the soft, heavy thumping of falling earth.

That shell had exploded close to the place where Dorn stood. It
terrified him. It reduced him to a palpitating, stricken wretch, utterly
unable to cope with the terror. It was not what he had expected. What
were words, anyhow? By words alone he had understood this shell thing.
Death was only a word, too. But to be blown to atoms! It came every
moment to some poor devil; it might come to him. But that was not
fighting. Somewhere off in the blackness a huge iron monster belched
this hell out upon defenseless men. Revolting and inconceivable truth!

It was Dorn's ordeal that his mentality robbed this hour of novelty and
of adventure, that while his natural, physical fear incited panic and
nausea and a horrible, convulsive internal retching, his highly
organized, exquisitely sensitive mind, more like a woman's in its
capacity for emotion, must suffer through imagining the infinite agonies
that he might really escape. Every shell then must blow him to bits;
every a